Lithics from Swanscombe on display at the Museum of London
British Museum
Bone fragments and tools, representing the earliest humans known to have lived in England, have been found from 1935 onwards at the Barnfield Pit about 2Â km (1 mile) outside the village. This site is now the Swanscombe Heritage Park. Swanscombe Man (now thought to be female) was a late Homo erectus or an early Archaic Homo sapiens.[2] The c. 400,000-year-old skull fragments are kept at the Natural History Museum in London with a replica on display at the Dartford Museum. Lower levels of the Barnfield Pit yielded evidence of an even earlier, more primitive human, dubbed Clactonian Man.
The area was already famous for the finds of numerous Palaeolithic-era handaxes—mostly Acheulean and Clactonian artifacts, some as much as 400,000 years old—when in 1935/1936 work at Barnfield Pit uncovered two fossilised skull fragments. These fragments came to be known as the remains of Swanscombe Man, a name they retained despite a re-identification that established that they had belonged to a young woman.[1] These remained the oldest human fossils discovered anywhere in the UK, until the 1994 and 1995 discoveries of 500,000-year-old human leg bones and teeth at Boxgrove.
The Swanscombe skull has been identified as Homo heidelbergensis. It dates to the Hoxnian Interglacial 400,000 years ago, and since this follows the extreme Anglian ice age which drove humans out of the British Isles, the Swanscombe people must represent a re-colonisation.[2]
The skull fragments were found in the lower middle terrace gravels at a depth of almost 8 metres beneath the surface. They were found by Alvan T. Marston, an amateur archaeologist who visited the pit between quarrying operations to search for flint tools. A third, matching fragment of the same skull was found in 1955 by Bertram and John Wymer.
Further excavations, carried out between 1968-1972 by Dr. John d'Arcy Waechter, uncovered more animal bone and flint tools, and established the extent of a former shoreline that the bones were found on.
Most of the bone finds are now in the Natural History Museum in London, with the stone finds at the British Museum.
The other key paleolithic sites in the UK are Happisburgh, Pakefield, Pontnewydd, Kents Cavern, Paviland, and Gough's Cave.
from "Antiquity of Man" via archive.or